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Warning: I bought a cheap coax stripper that cost me a whole morning
I was trying to save a few bucks last month and grabbed a no-name coax stripper from a discount tool site for like $12. It looked fine online, but the blade was dull right out of the box. I was on a job in a new apartment building, and it kept mashing the braid instead of cutting the jacket clean. I had to re-terminate the same line three times because the signal was junk, and each time I had to re-run the cable from the wall plate. That one cheap tool wasted about 3 hours of my time, which is way more than the $50 I would have spent on a good one. I ended up having to drive to the supply house at lunch to buy a proper Klein stripper anyway. Has anyone else had a tool fail so bad it wrecked your schedule for the day?
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dianam193mo ago
Yeah, that "mashing the braid instead of cutting" thing is the worst. My buddy had a similar disaster with a bargain-bin crimper. The jaws were so loose they crushed every RJ45 connector he tried, leaving little metal shards inside. He had to re-do an entire office's network drops because the connections kept dropping. He was there until almost midnight fixing it.
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patricia323mo ago
Metal shards inside the connector? That's a new level of bad. How did the crimper even manage to crush them that completely? Your poor buddy, having to redo everything from scratch after a full day's work.
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emmaking14d ago
The braid mashing is the worst because it creates a nightmare you don't even see until the signal fails. That metal shard problem your buddy had sounds like a hidden time bomb where every single connector is just waiting to fail randomly. Cheap tools like that end up costing you double in hours and materials, plus the drive to go buy the real tool anyway.
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